Month: October 2008

Would Someone Please Finally Ban Reality Shows?

As I was making my way to The Firm™ in my very own Benzo this morning, I was skimming over the morning dose of new coalitions, old farts and worried investment bankers. However, something stood out: Namely, Maja, one of the contestants in The Farm, the second installment of a popular reality show produced by POP TV, apparently lost her unborn child as a result of stress while filming. According to a story by Dnevnik, she was promised full medical care for the duration of the filming (as most of you know, contestants live on the set until the end of the show or until they get thrown out by the viewers) and has decided to stay. Things however did not go well and as bad blood started flowing between contestants (as is usually the case in reality shows), her pregnancy took a turn for the worse and she had an abortion.

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Kmetija/The Farm

Now I have a long-standing beef with reality shows. This latest incident only convinces me that reality shows are harmful, unethical and abusive both to the public and especially the contestants and should therefore not exist. At all.

Reality shows are anything but real. They are a carefuly coreographed social experiment with a predictable result: higher ratings, more advertising money and a bigger market share. Naturally, the sun always shines on TV and the viewing public is presented with a congested nothing of everyday life. Not. Since no one can make nothing look good (some politicians are excpetion to the rule), games are devised, which are designed to promote a dog-eat-dog mentality, with contestants trying to please the public but usually faling prey to their personal traits. They are chosen among tens if not hundreds of candidates which are profiled, screened, tested and checked from every possible aspect, including pyschological (in)compatibility. The aim being to create an enviroment of maximum possible conflict. Because conflict sells. And the last sentece is the only reality there is. Everything else is created, produced, crafted, coreographed, manipulated and – well – faked.

Media don’t present reality, they create it.

I should know, I work in media.

There is a difference between ordinary public, the “media consumers” if you will and “media professionals”, individuals and organisations who create media and/or live off them (celebrities, perfomers, journalists, politicians, opinion makers, etc…). The latter know the name of the game and are acutely aware of the fact that what the viewing public is presented with, is at best a close approximation of reality and take that into consideration when entering a relationship with the media. That is why you will often see two professionals nearly get into a fight on TV, but see them hapily breaking bread over a bottle of beer only hours later.

The “media consumers” have no such luxury. They can either accept what media serve them or choose to ignore them completely. They do not enjoy the privilige of a behind-the-scenes look. And naturally producers of reality shows do little to disspell the faked reality of television which is the main driving force behind people applying en masse to enter these shows.



“Wow, I’ll be on TV! Everyone I know will see me on TV and I’ll be famous! This is my big break! Maybe I’ll start a musical career, like what-was-her-name, you know Miss Slovenia!”



When “media consumers” enter reality shows they become both object of mockery and admiration, fueling the desire of other “media consumers” to be there in their place. However, when they outlive their usefulness, the TV will shun and reject them without a blinking an eye, just as it took them onboard without hesitation as soon as it became apparent they had they “have what it takes” for making the show interesting, whatever that may be.



“So, you’re pregnant, huh? Shit, and we’ve already set everything up… Look, it’s your call, but if you decide to stay, we promise to give you full medical support for as long as you’re here. Hey, mom and dad will see you every time they switch the TV on. Or even over the internet. You’ll be a big hit and since you’re pregnant everyone will like you. What could be better than that?”



If producers of the reality show had any sort of moral scruple, they would not have let Maja enter the show no matter what. Perhaps this girl would have lost her child anyway. There’s no way of knowing. But being in what can only be described as a hostile and stressful enviroment could not have helped her condition one bit.

Producers of reality shows claim to respond to public demands. Wrong. Just as with reality, media also creates demand for content, especially when they market it right. But the what they actually respond to is a drive for profit. TV producers invest respectable amounts of money in reality shows and in return get an attentive public, higher ratings, higer market share a shit load of advertising money and even bigger pile of money they made by charging for all those text messages sent and 24/7 internet access.

And what does the viewing public get in return? That there are people out there whose lives are just as miserable as theirs.

P.S.: It could be, that it was all an elaborate PR stunt, and that I’ve fallen for it. As I said, media create reality.

Having The Cake And Eating It

Now that the final results of the elections are known and Janez Janša finally sort of conceded, the time has come for Borut Pahor to go about forming a coalition. All eyes are on DeSUS at the moment and bets are being made as to what concession exactly will Karl Erjavec get from the presumptive new PM, with the former already making noises that he expects to get a greater infulence than the smallest coalition party. Katarina Kresal of LDS went apeshit in responce, saynig that members of The Trio (SD, Zares, LDS) should be given prefferential treatment, because DeSUS is a member of Janša’s existing coalition.

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Katarina Kresal and Karl Erjavec (source and source respectively)

Kresal’s comment drew a lot of criticism, not in the least by St. Luka, who published an op-ed on Vest.si yesterday (unfortunately Slovene only). It’s gist is that Katarina Kresal and LDS should not receive prefferential treatment, because it was the voters who gave votes to whichever party they saw fit and that the mere fact that The Trio existed does not make its members any more entitled to ministerial posts than any other member of the coalition.

Pengovsky (who ran an op-ed in a Sunday paper, by the way. Luckily, Slovene only) begs to differ. Namely. To a cetain point KK’s statements have merit. It would be ineed somewhat foolsih if Borut Pahor didn’t recoginse the interdependency of The Trio. SD, Zares and LDS need each other. Although the left is not exactly known for the ability to stick together, the fact is that any of the three parties would be very much alone, cold and scared without the other two. They were in it together almost from the very begining (insofar as we can define a speicific point of their begining) and if DeSUS missed the party, then – well – tough luck.

On the other hand, one can understand St. Luka and – by extention – Karl Erjavec (although I assume St. Luka did not intend to defend Teflon Karl). They recevied an unprecedented amount of votes, they are the fourh largest parilamentary group and do not intend to play the part of the fifth wheel. They want to cash in on the votes they got and are acutely aware of their position. However, this is not a game of chess (not yet, anyway), but rather a case of feeding the political masses with two loafs of bread. But unlike Jesus of Nazareth, Borut Pahor does not have enough to go around and will have to dissappoint a lot of people as it is.

So the 64.000 euro question is, whether Pahor should reward Erjavec and DeSUS for being late for the party or pussyfoot around them, given the party’s importance in securing a majority in the parliament.

I think Pahor’s priority should be in forming a more or less stable core of the coalition. DeSUS will probably assume the role of an attention whore from the start, which might ultimately lead to its premature departure from the coalition. Keeping the other two coalition partners happy will go a long way in a scenario like this.

Furthermore: although Katarina Kresal is still a bit rough around the edges and does tend to talk a lot even when she should listen, she seems to be a fast learner and will very likely know the game inside out within a year. And since her party is a member of the victorious Trio, she can and should receive a status that is more than just a reflection of the vote. Without DeSUS there is no coalition (well, at the very least it becomes harder to form one). But without LDS there is no Trio. So if Borut Pahor wants to position himself as a leader of the left bloc, he better keep LDS and Katarina Kresal happy.

Obviously the same applies in case of Gregor Golobič and Zares, but somehting tells me that GG will be able to hold his own against Pahor. But just to make sure that Slovenia avoids four more years of a top-down approach in politics, where all leaders of coalition parties were also ministers, enabling the PM to boss them around, the president of the Parliament should be a member of one of the junior coalition parties, possibly its president. This would also restore the balance of power in Slovenia, which was tilted heavily in favour of the executive branch in the last four years, reducing the parliament to rubber-stamp duties.

But can Borut Pahor have the cake and eat it? Surprisingly, I think yes. Namely. He will probably have to split 14 ministerial posts and 14 state secreatries (second only to ministers) among coalition parties, where (for argument’s sake) a state secretary is “worth” half a ministerial posts. SD has 29 deputies, Zares has 9, DeSUS 7 and LDS 5, equaling 50 votes in the parliament. And to keep LDS happy, the presumptive PM might think along the lines of giving LDS and DeSUS the same number of ministers and state secretaries, making a slight dent in DeSUS stature (but not much), perhaps offsetting that by giving them one really important ministry. But not the ministry of defence. Even Karl knows better by now :mrgreen: